Bing beats Google in partnership with Facebook's Graph Search

Earlier today, Facebook announced a new advanced search engine for users called Graph Search. The engine allows users to search content friends and others have shared in rather interesting ways.

For example, a phrase like “Friends who live in Los Angeles under 30” would produce a list of all your friends who currently live in Los Angeles and are under 30 years old. While Graph Search was built by Facebook, sometimes results from the web need to be pulled in to help add context to results. Facebook was planning on working with Google, but that plan fell apart over privacy concerns.

When using Graph Search, you might want external data (like weather, ticket prices, etc) pulled into the results. That data will be supplied from Bing because Google wasn’t willing to work with Facebook on their privacy needs. When a Facebook user changes their privacy setting on something like a photo, Google was unwilling to remove it from their search index. Facebook hasn’t always had the best stance on privacy, but the company has been making recent efforts to simplify the overall privacy experience. It’s really interesting that Google didn’t want to work with Facebook and instead chose to place the importance of their search results over privacy concerns from users.

Tweet of the day comes from Ed Bott, talking about the whole breakdown between Facebook and Google he said:

Facebook’s Graph Search has a lot of promise to be a useful tool, mostly because of the amount of data that users have made Facebook privy too. This partnership with Bing should help boost their overall standing in the search engine wars.

A win for Bing and a loss for Google. Now whether or not you decided to use Facebook is entirely up to you. It’s just worth highlighting when an awesome deal like this comes up. No word yet when we can expect this in the Windows Phone Facebook app. We’ll let you know when it does come.

Reader comments

Bing beats Google in partnership with Facebook's Graph Search

This can only mean good things for Bing. For one, they will have more content and users and from it hopefully form better search algorithms. I just wished they announced instagram for WP today though :-(

Yeah I kinda consider it karma since google has a big monopoly on apps that are mainstream to all mobile devices, and to hear that google won't make any app for windows phone really killed how I look at them as a company.

Your thoughts are short-sighted. Why not take both. Google passed because they have a "no compromises" rule - not because they felt like they would be helping the competition. If that was the case there would be zero google/facebook integration- including Android.

Despite Google having Google+, they realise Facebook is the more dominant network, it's only in their best interest to support Facebook in some capacity on their Android platform; it would be otherwise suicide to not. But that doesn't discount the fact that they're not Microsoft who've invested into Facebook and have a close working relationship with them. I don't view it as Google "missing out" - I just see it unlikely that Google would want to facilitate Facebook's growth. But I equally see it unlikely that Facebook would give Google to access all the information that Facebook has amassed.

Actually Google has wanted to work with Facebook in the past. Facebook refuses to share its data with google though. That's what prompted google to make google+. No one remembers the hissy fit google threw? They want access to that data. Its valuable

I've seen a few people say this now, and it's plain wrong. If competition meant companies wouldn't cooperate, then why do you see the things I'm going to list below?

--Google apps on iOS
--Wordament on iOS
--Several other Microsoft features on iOS and Android (namely SkyDrive and Skype)
--Microsoft Office on Mac OS/OS X
--Google Chrome on Windows (when Google has released its own ChromeOS alternative)
--Google search available with the Windows Phone "Search" button
--AMD video cards in Intel computers (you'd think they'd only support NVIDIA cards or something, though that would be tough to pull off)

There are likely MANY more examples of this I could name if I tried, plus many more others could name. Competition does not totally kill cooperation when it is mutually beneficial.

If you go into the phone's settings, you can change the "Search" button to prefer Google over Bing. I'm guessing the moronic bureaucracy would have called Microsoft out on antitrust violations if they didn't put that setting in, regardless of marketshare.

Not so sure about that, not unless the Facebook share price drops massively. Their current market capitalisation is $65 billion, which is a little more than the $8 billion that Skype cost.
From what I can see Bing is not powering the actual product, but is just the external source for web based data when the Graph Search can't provide adequate results. That's a good thing for Bing, but not that significant.

Exactly. The main thing is that Google could have had those users driven to their search service and instead they are going to Bing. This could cause Bing's search marketshare numbers to go up ever so slightly with more people using them. I don't think it will cause a huge influx, but I think MS would like to nickel and dime their way to the big article headline that states: Bing surpasses Google as the Internet search king. They still have a ways to go, but Bing has dramatically increased its marketshare.
And a bigger Bing means more advertizing revenue and a stronger push of MS services. Microsoft would love nothing more than for people to use the Outlook calendar instead of Google through their online services and utilize a monthly subscription to Office to expand on that. This is about limiting Google and preventing much expansion for Google's products.

Like someone else said, here's hoping Microsoft used those negotiations to bring up apps for Instagram and Facebook (one made BY Facebook, that is). I mean, once Facebook told them Google didn't want to join them, they could have used this as leverage to get those things in return, perhaps. Facebook wouldn't have REALLY gone to Yahoo, would it?

Yeah, I'm just trying to think of a reason Microsoft wouldn't say "Google turned you guys down, so if you want our help, you had better get official, first-party Facebook and Instagram apps for Windows Phone made soon."

The only reason they wouldn't push that, in my mind, is that Yahoo might have been an alternative, but who wants that?

I don't particularly think this feature on Facebook is all that useful... at least not for me. I suppose if you have hundreds or thousands of "friends" maybe, but I look at my list of friends and know the answer to any possible questions without a search, because I actually KNOW the people.

Does nobody consider it odd that despite existing partnerships with Bing, Facebook was even considering Google to begin with? Seems like it would have been a no brainer. Maybe Google was never being considered at all and it was just a way of slapping them in the face. I mean come on, Facebook commenting on anyone's privacy concerns is total BS on its own, since they just built a feature that by its usage is kind of a violation of privacy.

I swear if it weren't for my family being so spread out all over the country that I need FB to keep in touch easily, I wouldn't bother with the service at all.

I don't know how relevant are the results of Bing in areas like the Unitied States, United Kingdom, but in Hungary it's just terrible. Bing Maps can't show letters like "ő" in some of our cities names.
I'd love to use Bing and I'd love to use the services of Microsoft, but with Windows Phone, Xbox and everything else, I feel like... "Yeah, there are tons of nice features, but only in the US and some other countries... not here." Using the search button on Windows Phone when Locale set to Hungarian brings up the browser only with the bing search page.

From an infrastructure stand point it makes perfect sense... if the hosted servers ae Windows Machines then the content is easily indexed... and once things are indexed in Windows... it's super easy to find. The reason google works so well is because of their Spiders scouring every website that pops up on the web.

As a business owner who has advertised on Google i am tired of thier crap. Now, in oreder for my customers to leace a review of my business thier forced to join Google+ which sucks balls because most of my customers dont waant to join so that cost me raatings which cost my business money. Eff Google.